“So,” I said, eyeing the card festooned with a seemingly random series of punches, “what the heck do I do with it?”

“Well, you stick it in the machine and hope that it gives you the response you’re looking for.”

The machine, of course, was an obstinate hulk of steel, looming over us in mute omniscience, glaring down with its handfuls of malignantly glinting gauges, like some perverted mechanical spider face festooned tangles of multicolored wire-bundle hair. Near eye-level was the input slot, a featureless orifice framed with burnished brass, perhaps a sardonic attempt at a belly button by whoever had birthed this mechanical monstrosity. But it fed the hungry city above, so who was he to complain?

“And if it’s the wrong response?”

“I’m sure it will be fine.”

“But we don’t even know what that card means, or what it does...”

But it had been in the case with the shiny otherwordly markings, and when the glitches had begun, all anyone had been able to think of was to send them down here to feed the machine once again.

And so, he stuck the card in the slot. When the card was about halfway in, something on the inside of the machine grabbed it from between his fingers and quickly whisked it away into its nether regions, accompanying the progress with a series of discordant clicks and whistles. The gauges began to click their needles back and forth in a mad, arrythmic cadence, and the occasional puff of steam emanated from the top. And finally, off to the side, a hacked-on typewriter device began clickety-clacking its way across the roll of output paper. The gauges gave one final spasmodic click, seeming to glare straight through his skull, and then the machine went completely silent, without even the sinister background hum that the device usually gave off.

He walked over and tore off the sheet of paper, poring over the words, few as they were, transcribed thereon:

"The response is left as an exercise to the reader."